Disarming the Armed Man: On Yossi Maurey's Medieval Music, Legend, and the Cult of St Martin: The Local Foundations of a Universal Saint

To open my brief talk, I would like to thank the organizers and, of course, Yossi, for allowing me the honour of speaking before this audience and greet Yossi upon the publication of a wonderful book. When I first realized that I am not supposed to give this talk in Hebrew, I was terrified for a minute or so, that I am expected to speak Latin, but I was happy to learn that even medievalists sometime resort to barbarian languages of the kind I can handle.

In chapter five of the book – From Pacifist to Knight – Yossi turns to discuss processes that influenced the image of Saint Martin in circles somewhat wider than those discussed in the first four chapters. The rise of the ethos of chivalry is one of these processes, and its relation to the tradition of the so-called ‘armed man’ masses (the L’homme arme masses) is but a symptom. Today I wish to shift the focus, for a few minutes, towards what was to happen further down that road. If Martin became the armed man towards the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, I wish to argue that in the sixteenth century, this armed man was disarmed by Rome. More specifically, I will show how sixteenth-century music reflects Rome’s attempt to conceal Martin or, at least, to make him stand in line with all other saints and not shine above the others. This process took place a bit after the point where Yossi’s book ends, around the time of the Council of Trent and the revision and cleansing of the prayer books that followed that council. The earliest composers mentioned here will be those who are the latest in Yossi’s book. As they are considerably earlier from the composers I usually study, I could say that Yossi and I will meet here half-way chronologically. All the arguments I present today, nay, the entire inquiry, are all influenced and triggered by Yossi’s book and by the methodology he uses. 

Let us begin by opening the modern Catholic prayer book, the Liber Usualis, in the proper chants of the second Vespers of St. Martin’s feast—November eleventh. The Antiphon O beatum pontificem is not mentioned in Yossi’s book but, while considering possible Martinian topics for today, I was drawn to it by virtue of both its beauty and the fact that its text was set repeatedly by Renaissance composers. I was also intrigued by the fact that while the identity of that particular 'beatus pontificis' was clear to me, St. Martin of Tours, Martin’s name does not appear explicitly in the text. Reading Yossi’s book, I saw that during the middle ages, many items in Martinian liturgy did mention Martin by name.

As I found no recording of the chant, I beg your indulgence, I shall sing it myself. I remind you, this is the modern, 1961 edition of the Liber Usualis:

This is a masterly melody, with impeccable arch-form contour to be studied in composition class. Let me demonstrate the masterly rhetorical unfolding, gradually ascending to a climax and gradually descending back to a closure.

Let us examine a melodic reduction of the antiphon:

The first phrase stabilizes the finalis (D) with slight emphasis of the note F and return to the finalis D. The second phrase stabilizes the note F, that is, a note slightly higher than the finalis D. In the same way that the first phrase stabilized D but hinted at the F, here the second phrase stabilizes F but hints at an A, and then, back to the finalis.

The return to the finalis is temporary as the next phrase, the third phrase, stabilizes a note yet higher, a G, and then, again, ends on the finalis.

 Rhetorically, the fourth phrase, opening with the exclamation O sanctissima anima, is the climax of the chant, as it begins right away with a leap to a note higher-still, an A.   and for a short moment even reaches a high C, the climactic highest note in the chant. The phrase does not return to the finalis D but rests on the note F. And when it does finally descend, it overshoots the finalis and introduces an open ending on the tense note low-C.  

As I said, the concluding phrase brings closure. Its first notes, recapitulate the beginning of the first phrase, and the final phrase resolves the tense open ending of the fourth phrase. So, we see a masterly build-up from D to F to G to A and even C – a climactic moment coinciding with the exclamation O sanctissima anima that gives a distinctive musical emphasis to that exclamation, and then a descent from that high C, through the same stations – A, G, F, and the finalis D in reverse order. We shall return to that chant later on but do mark that the climactic moment is ‘the most-holy soul’, the anonymous sanctissima anima, whose identity we may infer, for the time being, only from the fact that the antiphon is sung on November eleventh, the feast of St. Martin. Martin’s name is not mentioned explicitly.

Who were those Renaissance composers who set the text of O beatum pontificem? When, where and why did they set it?

 I found about a dozen settings of the text from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If I ignore the mass movement from Obrecht’s mass, quoting only the melody of the antiphon as cantus firmus, and if I ignore also the setting by Lhéritier, now lost but probably from sometime in the first half of the century, I am left with settings that originate all from a very short span of some eighty years in total – from Willaert’s first book of motets in 1542 to the last two settings, both from 1624.

Let us note several other noteworthy details: Obrecht, Lhéritier, and Willaert were all northerners who worked in Italy. The next setting, published 1543 by the Spaniard Morales, seems at first to ruin the pattern. Here is the title page of the motet collection: 

‘MORALIS HISPANI’ is none but Cristóbal de Morales, born in Sevilla, by no means a northerner. But according to Jane A. Bernstein’s bibliographic study, only half of the motets here can be attributed to Morales with any certainty, and that the attribution in the title was purely commercial – the individual motets are unattributed and so, our 'O beatum potificem' could theoretically be by someone else! Indeed, the unattributed 'O beatum pontificem' in this collection appears in another motet collection from 1549: 

Encouraged by the fact that the motet was written by a northerner who travelled south, I went back to the table and corrected it. Indeed, only the next composer is unmistakably Italian, Gioseffo Zarlino, but he was the student and admirer of Willaert so his setting of O beatum pontificem can easily be explained as emulatio of his northern master. 

One of the important lessons to be learned from Yossi’s book is that liturgy is rarely a fixed fact. Where every word in the prayer is potentially a political punch in the face in never-ending municipal power struggles, the reader becomes more suspicious of the text. And, indeed, after reading the book I became suspicious. And justly so, as suddenly, getting back to Gero’s setting I noticed that the line "O Martine dulcedo, medicamentum et medice", the line that appears between the word principatum and the exclamation O sanctissima anima, does in fact include Martin’s name, and that is in contrast to what I remembered from the modern version. Moreover, this line appears in all the 16th-century settings I compiled in the table! But it is absent from the modern text that I sang earlier. It should have appeared here, where the red marking is, and vanished. 

O Martine dulcedo, medicamentum et medice, ‘Oh Martin, sweetness, medicine and healer!’ Alongside the mention of St. Martin as healer, the very fact that he is named explicitly may hint that the modern variant, to be interpreted as referring to Martin only from the context, is a generic variant, applicable to any bishop, was made so on purpose.

Why was the line O Martine dulcedo, medicamentum et medice, edited out from the antiphon? By whom? And when?

Apparently it was edited out around 1600, as a part of the reform of the prayer books, following the council of Trent. I checked several antiphonaries: In an Antiphonarium Romanum from Venice (1623) (on the left), the line is already absent. By contrast, in an Antiphonarium Romanum from Venice (on the right), some twenty-six years earlier, with the title page saying that it conforms to the decisions of the council, it still appears. Needless to say that all antiphonaries I checked from before 1600, have that line, and so do all earlier manuscripts. It was an integral part of the chant.

What did the reformers find offensive about this line? I am no theologian but I can easily see how Martin’s healing abilities (of course he also had the reputation of healing cripples and reviving the dead) was frowned upon by the reformers of Trent. If the people of Tours, as Yossi tells us, were engaged in a “divine arms race” and did not hesitate to promote bishops to the degree of an apostle, it is possible that the reformers of Trent tried to roll the cart back. Perhaps they were saying something like “Martin is a saint by virtue of his most-sacred soul, and not because of dubious miracles that rival the exclusive domain of the son of God. Fides? Gladly! Spes? Terrific! Caritas? Whenever you like. But let us leave the resurrection of dead to those authorised to do so! Ecclesiastical hierarchy suffered enough blows in the sixteenth-century and if we want to reinforce it, we should likewise reinforce hierarchy in the dogma. Martin may cut his cape but, please, nothing more.”(end fictional quote) Martin, the most sacred soul, was no threat to the dogma. But Martin as healer, was now harder to grasp.

The melody of the earlier variant confirms my hypothesis as it dangerously equates the human Martin and the easy-to-grasp abstract entity – the “most sacred soul”. 

Another melodic reduction of the same kind I demonstrated earlier, but this time a "double reduction" will help to clarify what happened to the melody. The first stave, described here as pre-1600, analyses the unfolding of the ascent in the earlier variant of the chant from the 1596 Antiphonarium. The second stave described here as post-1600 is based on the analysis of the later version, the one I sang earlier in my talk. That post-s1600 version did not have the line O Martine dulcedo, hence the blank space in the middle of that stave.

Do you remember the climactic moment from the chant I sang earlier?  Here, the ascent from D, through F and G to A remains intact but who awaits us at the top? Is it the sanctissima anima? no! It is Martin flesh-and-blood! The sanctissima anima does arrive eventually, in the next phrase. But does the most-sacred soul challenge the supremacy of Martin flesh-and-blood? Oh no! It is, in fact, identical, with the exception that by the end of the word anima it already foreshadows the descent of the chant to the note E.

The line O Martine dulcedo ends up one note higher, so, metaphorically, Martin is one note higher than the abstract sacred soul. To paraphrase the cult film Spinal Tap, “it is one higher...” To round off this address, let us get back to the motets based on the antiphon text.

Of the dozen settings (Obrecht’s mass included), it is the setting by the northerner Jhan Gero that intrigued me most, if only for the fact that I haven’t heard the name until a few weeks ago. When I realized that there is no recording, not even an edition of his music, I thought the least I could do is to score it up for you. 

It is densely scored – three tenors and bass (do not be mislead by the names of the parts... I checked the vocal ranges). A man of his own age, Gero’s approach to rhetoric is very much renaissance-like – whenever he wants to emphasise a phrase, he does so effectively. Here, it is undoubtedly the phrase O sanctissima anima where the ongoing imitative merry-go-round is put to a halt and the choir addresses the sacred soul as one. 

Although the phrase O Martine dulcedo is not as emphasised as the sanctissima anima, Martin’s presence is stronger than one could expect. In fact, the textual variant taken by Gero, not only that it includes the direct address – O Martine dulcedo, but one additional reference to Martin right at the beginning of the motet: O beatum pontificem Martinum and so forth... In other words – do not even think of interpreting the words O beatum pontificem as “any other bishop!” Right from the start we stress that it is Martin. You don’t get it in the opening phrase, you’ll get it in the phrase O Martine Dulcedo. You don’t get it then, you’ll get it from the context. But you will not be able to misinterpret the antiphon. This textual variant gets us closer to the point in the evolution of Martinian liturgy, when the contact with Martin was immediate... intimate... Martin was then closer to the image of the local saint, still generations away from the disarmed, abstract, sacred soul, that will be elevated after the council of Trent.

In fact, this is where the work of this little-known composer becomes even more interesting, as it is the only setting that contains the variant O beatum pontificem Martinum. Now, we know next to nothing on Jhan Gero, only gusses about where he worked in Italy, but nothing about the establishments he served in his younger days in the north, let alone where he comes from. And lo, a rare textual variant may provide a smoking gun, as it may yield a “short list” of the churches that used that textual variant. There is something comforting in the notion that the textual variant of a Martinian antiphon, may in turn shed light of a shadowy figure that the only thing that we know about is that it was active between 1540 and 1555. Two sentences in the New Grove dictionary. All the rest is conflicting evidence regarding the churches where he worked: either in Venice, either in the service of the prince of Bisinyano (but where we do not know), or perhaps even in France – he wrote one motet in honour of Francois the first. So hints inside O beatum pontificem may be instrumental in fleshing out the skeletal wording “Composer of northern, perhaps Walloon extraction.”

One last detail that drew my attention: look at the hand-written correction on the British Library copy of the 1549 motets. 

'Quam si gladius persecutoris' says the print; 'quam et si gladius persecutoris' says the hand, breaking the semi-breve into two minims in order to stick the extra syllable somewhere. The later hand does that twice, and the word ‘et’ does indeed appear in almost all other settings or antiphonaries I surveyed. Was it a mistake? Well, probably not, as it appears also in the so-called “Morales” collection of 1543. Again, no ‘et’. This variant I found in one manuscript, a Franciscan antiphon, today in Fribourg Switzerland; and in one early-16th century book of hours that originates, surprise surprise, in Touraine.

In my talk I suggested a footnote to an optional sequel to Yossi’s book. Thus, I elegantly bypassed the discussion of issues relevant to the periods that Yossi covered and, instead, I pursued one of that lines of inquiry (that of the plastic image of Saint Martin), and stretched it, chronologically, so I can re-visit it from my own, sixteenth-century, view point.

As far as Jhan Gero is concerned, the specifics of the Martinian text, in conjunction with other details (for example, the Tenor-Tenor-Tenor-Bass scoring) – may hold the key to valuable information about that shadowy figure – Gero. In truth, of all the scholarly challenges that pile on my desk these days, it is the numerous motets of Jhan Gero that seem like the most promising escape from the mid-teaching-term tedium, with all the fascinating marking and lecturing that teaching term has to offer…

In my own, idiomatic, perhaps egocentric, way, I stressed not the obvious intrinsic qualities of the book – chief among these is Yossi’s witty and meticulous writing. Instead, I hope that I was able, if not to convince that Martin’s image was being willingly suppressed, to show that ingenious writing on medieval music-and-liturgy may directly inspire scholars of later periods. I think that, in that sense, too: both author and press may boast a book with inspired and inspiring scholarship.